Trash? Sure. But even trash can be memorable

It's just junk that amasses in the car over a summer with the grandkids. So why is it so hard to throw it away?

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The seat slides forward with an electronic hum revealing a Happy Meal pooch named Buddy from last year's "The Secret Life of Pets," a petrified french fry and a piece of Smartfood popcorn. The foodstuffs get tossed out onto the gravel drive where Lucy scoffs them with a snip-snap. On its side lies a kid-sized bottle labeled Jug O'Chocolate Milk, its safety seal and cap snug against the metal track. And sand, it's everywhere. The car's floor is more beach camp than black carpet.

Yesterday, at the post office, I tried intercepting a friendly stranger who wanted to pat Lucy, who was waiting with her head out the car window. Those apparent dunes of sand, piled up over summer from the bottoms of many feet, and the strewn bits of daily life that can unfold from inside a car were my source of embarrassment. The nice lady had caught sight of the papery scraps and crumbs, books and toys, flyaway dog hairs, and I found myself explaining that the grandkids had just left after a summer stay.

Only the night before, I'd offered my husband the notion that we should motion to "let the car be the dog and grandkidmobile." Why stress over sticky, stuffed armrest receptacles, leather creases caked with sour milk, and door panels scuffed with grime and dust? It's just a car.

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But that day, after running errands, I succumbed to that short-lived freedom from order, and pulled up in front of the garage, where I thought I'd only have to shake out a few floor mats and feel better for it. The end-of-the-summer dust clouded the air and clung to my blue jeans, and though I was sure a couple of whacks would do it, after three sets of 10, the puffs of fine particles persisted. There was no turning back. Lifting those mats from their sandy burial grounds and brushing off the kids' toys had transported me into the odd roles of equal parts exorcist and archeologist. I was all in, and the idea of letting my car become a happy-go-lucky trash bin had been wiped away like the smudges on my rear view mirror.

Fueled by images of scrubbed grandkids in gleaming car seats and groomed dogs in spiffy bandanas, a date night out to a fine restaurant in sparkly sandals, I began gathering up, pulling out and scraping off, even as I pushed up my sleeves and sighed.

I stuffed and tossed, and it became a game fitting the minings into one small Dunkin' Donuts cup. And something else happened. I can't be sure if it was the soft, sweet-eyed, sand-covered hedgehog that called to mind Steven's hazel beauties, or the piece of bubble gum saved by Robert, probably for one more bubble-blowing contest with me. Or maybe it was the lost Pokemon coin discovered in a crack vindicating tears shed and conversations shared about how things thought lost forever often turn up, bringing relief and delight. Perhaps it was the pirates playing card from the sticker book Collin had asked for one rainy day.

The contents of my car -- each had its own stories to tell, like the book on sharks and the time spent turning its dog-eared pages on a long ride. And when I looked at the pieces sticking out of one clear cup that had once held my daughter's iced latte, its straw poked through its lid at catawampus angles, the stuff, now stowed inside, stood for vignettes, flashes of time, summer moments we'd shared traveling to all the places we loved, and some that we didn't, traveling the way American families do.

I spent the next two hours bending and twisting into underneath places, diving into narrow, tight spots, devising ways to best reach a lone paper clip and a single pebble; shaking out cloths and dunking sponges into a sudsy bucket, wringing and repeating the process, wiping down seats, dash and implements, sucking up dirt from every mechanical crevice, and along the way putting aside a "Pete the Cat" library book and a "Despicable Me" miniature Minion.

The litter, some refuse, like two Starbucks green splash sticks in my door pocket, and the Smile Makers slick back to a sticker presented by the pleasant clerk at the grocery store who asked, "Have the boys been good?" Some items to be retrieved, like a toy retro motorcycle and a tiny polar-bear pullback car. Various pieces of waste, each a sample of verity, a statement of where we had come, who we are and who we might become, running over the lip of a Solo cup.

I'd rescued two "Agnes Rockin' Unicorns" made in Vietnam, twins with pony-tailed girls riding white backs and pink-manes; recovered a red section of a Lego scooter, and saved a smiling Lego man in a grey hoodie. I dumped a clear straw, an orange purple-striped straw, a twist-off top to an organic banana-strawberry sauce squeeze snack, an empty Golden Bowl fortune-cookie wrapper from the Singapore in Fitchburg commemorating an after-football practice spontaneous family dinner; a green, dime-sized bottle cap; four America's Original Double Bubble wrappers, signifying a stop at the pharmacy for sunglasses for me and gum for the kids (three empties, one with ABC gum, one with a whole piece, which I almost popped into my mouth, except for the disappointing grit on one side); a Reese's peanut-butter cup's brown pleated cup; three Red Bird Southern Refresh-Mint wrappers from the day the boys came with me to the salon and were treated to sweets and complimentary, nontoxic, wash-out red-and-blue hair dye; a peel-off sticker marked "For Your Protection Remove after activating your PIN"; a wad of wrapper from a KitKat chocolate bar; a delicate, wrinkled Hershey's Kisses banner; an African Market Baskets Fair Trade tag for berry picking marked 14$; another fast-food french fry surprisingly still intact; a mushy Yoplait Gogurt wrapper low-fat yogurt stamped "fortified with vitamins A & D," flavored "sponge berry" and sticky with a piece of still-fragrant pink gum; a miniature plastic toy seat with hinges stamped Honda underneath; a balled-up 100 percent recycled brown napkin; a 9V1 Duracell Coppertop guaranteed for five years; a tiny stick, probably reminiscent of the kids' inside joke on the trail surrounding the world's tiniest hiking stick; a red plastic strip of spent cap-gun ammunitions; some fuzzy lint from a stuffed animal; a Kellogg's Nutri Grain soft baked raspberry 1.3-oz. bar foil wrapper; more crinkled straw paper; a watermelon Air Nerds foily thing; two heavy-duty wire ties like the ones that hold a toy truck, for instance, fast in its package; a Dunkin' Donuts receipt for $3.26 served by cashier "Katie W," Aug. 28, 2017; a lemon chew Starburst waxy paper square; a straw wrapper marked "not recommended for use in hot beverages"; peach and lemonade artificially flavored tic- tac mixer shrink wrap; two Irving Pump Up the Fun $5 Million Summer Giveaways with perforations unbroken; a black-cherry chew wrapper; a Hershey's bite-size chocolate wrapper; an ink-run; a faded service garage tag for the Acura; a couple of really shriveled raisins; half a peanut; a tiny barcode sticker stamped "Made in China"; and, finally, one almost-indiscernible lopped-off price-tag fastener.

From the back, under the driver's seat, a Polar Caves cinch sack that our grandson had picked out after we'd climbed through the caves with his older brother and cousin, lay flat, and proved to be empty. I recalled the photos we took by the large, cartoonish polar bears at the entrance of the park. Next to that, a SpongeBob carnival toy in red tie, and I remembered the brothers' stories of a weekend with dad, of tractor pulls and piglet chases. And a yellow Fritter Time school bus from a "Cars 3Splash Racer" game that Steven had to have with him the morning we went to a pancake house and Papa taught them the "pilot's alphabet."

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